Propaganda and the fear of being shunned

Over at The Federalist today, Stella Morabito explains that University Students Support for Terrorism Isn't About Ideology, It's Condtioning. The seeming unanimous support for people who murder grandmothers and behead babies who have done nothing to them is the same thing that caused middle class women to side with BLM, or with the Nazis during WWII. It is fear of loss of social status, of social isolation, of being cancelled. It is an insidious tactic that has been used by tyrants and dictators forever. We can not survive alone; we need others. But if we are socially isolated, we fear the loss of the ability to survive.

Ms. Morabito has a new book out, The Weaponization of Lonliness that explains to readers how tyrants and dictators have always used the weakness of people to herd them into agreeing to their own enslavement. People want to be liked, and fear to be shunned. Using propaganda, tyrants create the illusion that if you oppose their agenda, you will be isolated and shunned.

We are missing the biggest part of the picture if we focus only on ideology. Most commentators presume ideological capture of academia got us here. Or that it’s happening through cultural forces like “wokeness” and the spread of mental illness.

Those explanations make sense, but they go only so far. They don’t account for the mechanisms, the patterns, and the psychological processes behind those cultural forces. Ideology serves more as a vehicle for a conditioning process that prods students to accept an agenda. So we must first study those thought reform methods if we are ever to overcome them.

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We ought to pay a lot more attention to the dynamics of social status — and status anxiety — than to the ideology per se. After all, propagandists have always relied on emotional manipulation to create an illusion of unanimity with their narrative. This is also a central principle in advertising and fashion.

That’s because everybody, especially youth, has a hardwired need to feel connected to others, along with an intense fear of being socially isolated. That need and that fear are natural weaknesses easily manipulated by social engineers, cult leaders, and tyrants of every stripe. If people are conditioned to fear being despised and punished if they stray from the approved narrative, then most will not stray.

For those of us who attended a university in the 1960s and 1970s, with the intention of actually learning something, as opposed to spending a few years partying and making connections, today's academic environment may surprise. While the credential was important, we students were very concerned with learning the science, mathematics, and ways of thinking required to perform at a professional level. The politics of our professors was never discussed.

Consider what the typical college student can expect if faced with an ideological challenge. If they don’t accept the given line about transgenderism, climate alarmism, and now about Hamas’ terrorism as justifiable, they risk being canceled with demonizing labels such as “transphobe,” “climate denier,” “bigot,” and worse. And if they try to connect the dots by asking a reasonable question, they risk mockery as “conspiracy theorists.”

Furthermore, there is no logic in the context of the conditioning process. In Orwellian fashion, an object of hate can be switched back and forth without explanation. In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania was at war with Eurasia, but during Hate Week it suddenly switched to being at war with Eastasia. All were conditioned to comply in lockstep without questioning the abrupt change. (One can sense echoes of Jonestown, where the cult recruits obeyed their leader even to the point of drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid on command.)

The conditioner calls the shots, and the masses conform. That’s where most college students are today. They enter a university striving to get credentialed but are threatened at every turn with ridicule or expulsion if they don’t agree to the assigned narrative.

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What do they all have in common? A terror of being canceled, socially rejected, and despised by others, particularly by their reference group. Consider also the affluent suburban woman, scared to death of losing status among her peers. I made the following comparison during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots:

The psychological mechanism that drives the woke white woman of 2020 into Black Lives Matter obedience is the same mechanism that would have driven her into the National Socialist Women’s League of Nazi Germany in 1941. It might sound weird, but both appeal to the same forces: craving for status, the need for belonging, obedience to overwhelming propaganda, hatred of a common perceived enemy, terror of being lumped in with the ‘unfit,’ fear of shunning…

All is not necessarily lost. The fact that students are being fed lies and forced to repeat them back means that they can be recovered from darkness to the light. As these kids get out of school, and begin to make their way in the world, they may, just may, find the truth.